Romney Will Be Fine
by Brien Jackson
There’s a growing meme lately that the passage of the healthcare bill spells doom for Mitt Romney’s chance to win the Republican Presidential nomination. Basically the idea is that the Republican base has been whipped into a froth of opposition to “Obamacare,” and since Romney signed a program that’s essentally the same as the Affordable Care Act in Masachusetts, he’s not going to be able to win support in the Republican primary. The latest articulation I’ve seen came fron Ben Smith this morning, who compares the healthcae issues potential cost to Romney to the impact support for the Iraq War had on Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
For my part, I’m pretty skeptical of this. For one thing, 2012 is pretty far away. And yes, the early parts of the cycle are only a year away, but that aspect of the campaign is dominated by fundraising, which I doubt Romney will have trouble with. The Chamber of Commerce isn’t interested in fighting ove repeal of the bill, PhRMA and providers endorsed it, and non-healthcre businesses don’t really have much of a reason to care about it now that it’s passed. So I very much doubt that the economic interests who fund Republcan campaigns are going to find it much reason to cut off Romney. As far as the Republican electorate goes, I think the idea that they’re going to reject Romney 3 years ago because of his healthcare plan imputes a little too much intellectual sophistication onto the masses. For one thing, it could have been an issue in 2008 as well, when Hillary Clinton was proposing to basically take the Massachusetts system nationwide, but it never really came up, even though it’s not like Democratic plans for universal healthcare were only noticed on the right last year. Indeed, from 1993 to 2008, conservatives used “Hillarycare” as a short-hand for “Socialized medicine.” So the fact that it didn’t hurt Romney in 2008 bodes well for him in 2012. There’s also the fact that Romney can issue some mealy-mouth hedging about “states” and so forth that should buy him enough room to pivot to something else.
If anything, I think the Hillary/Iraq comparison is pretty good, but probably not for the same reason Smith does. Was her initial support for the Iraq War a drag on Clinton’s campaign? Sure. Did it cost her the nomination? Probably not. Compared to investing as much capital in Iowa as they did, even though she was at a distinct disadvantage in the state, and having absolutely no plan for a contest going past Super Tuesday or any kind of campaign presence in the contests between February 5 and March 4, I’d say it’s pretty low on the list of factors that could plausibly be said to have cost Clinton the campaign. What it did do was give her opponents particularly Obama, an early and consistent opening from which to attack her. And that’s probably about all this will do to Romney. Sarah Palin and Tim Pawlenty and John Thune or whomever is running will be able to respond to Romney’s attacks on the ACA by pointing out that he signed something similar in Massachusetts, but whether or not that proves devastating remains to be seen. For now, I don’t see any evidence that Romney is facing a backlash from the leadership of the conservative movement, which leads me to think it probably won’t hurt him much with the rubes either.
Tags: Mitt Romney
Actually, given how close the Democratic race was in 2008, I think you can make a very good case that Clinton’s support for the Iraq War did cost her the nomination. After all, she stumbled out of the gate, and was too far behind after February to catch up. More important, the Iraq War vote was Clinton’s vulnerability; without it, it’s doubtful that Obama gets a toehold against her, and she simply steamrolls the competition (as she did everyone but Obama).
I think the same thing holds here. Romney still has a fighting chance. But without health care, he was one of a couple candidates who had the inside track (the other was — possibly — Palin). Now, second-tier candidates like Pawlenty and Thune will have an opportunity to define themselves in opposition to Romney, and that opens the door for them.
Well I won’t discount the possibility, but for the most part I think the simplest explanations still hold; Obama (and Edwards) were better suited to Iowa than she was and their teams knew what they were doing there, South Carolina was decided by racial votes, and Obama won enough delegates in smaller states on Super Tuesday to keep the race going, and then racked up an insurmountable margin between Super Tuesday and Ohio/Texas. The Iraq vote definitely helped him establish an oppositional front to Clinton, but absent that he still would have had the newness factor, which I think helped more than anything. Although had Clinton been a vociferous opponent of the war, she wouldn’t have even faced a serious challenger.
As for Romney, I think this is imputing a bit too much idelogical consistency to the conservative movement. The rank and file will do whatever the radio talkers tell them to, and the radio talkers are bought and paid for shills far more than they are true believers. I don’t see any reason to think they’ll turn on Romney. He’s still posting at NRO after all.
[…] A while back, I opined that I didn’t really agree with the larger sentiment Mitt Romney’s signing of Romneycare in Massachusetts was necessarily going to doom his chances to win the Republican nomination in 2012. After reading this response to a Newsweek interviewer though, consider me converted: Back in February 2007, you said you hoped the Massachusetts plan would “become a model for the nation.” Would you agree that it has? […]